CommentsCORRUPTION WATCH-What if Angelenos had a City Council that maximized our quality of life instead of aggrandizing the profits of a handful of real estate developers?
Virtually every local problem discussed in CityWatch has the same cause – an unresponsive city council. Once elected, councilmembers ignore what their constituents want and vote unanimously for what other councilmembers want, which is often large real estate developments that gobble up hundreds of millions of our tax dollars.
People complain that since too few Angelenos vote, so why should we re-enact Einstein’s definition of insanity when voting for city council yields the same results every time? Only crazy people would support such a system thinking things will turn out differently next time.
Corruption Is Driving Los Angeles to the Bottom
During the past 16 years, the City of Los Angeles has gone from ranking near the top in all the positive measures for the good life to the bottom of the list. We’ve had bad traffic for decades, but now LA has the worse traffic congestion in the entire world.
Los Angeles has had a homeless population for decades, partly due to our good weather. The weather is still the same but now our homeless population so large it has become a multi-billion dollar problem. And the response of the City of Los Angeles to the plight of the poor who need affordable housing? Destroy 22,000 rent-control units! Then the city council unanimously says that to help the poor we need to give $1.2 billion to billionaires. Angelenos fall for this fraud wrapped up in the scam promoted by the criminal enterprise called, “The Los Angeles City Council.”
The list of foolish and corrupt projects the Los Angeles City Council supports runs over 10,000 – all unanimously approved. You can check for yourself here.
This interactive page lets you find out how many times a councilmember has voted in favor of measures. Overall, each city councilmember votes YES over 99.8% of the time. When it comes to development projects, the rate of unanimous “Yes” votes for all councilmembers over ten years is about 99.99999999%. It takes a little time to fiddle with the interactive nature of this website, but it is worth the effort.
There Is an Alternative
The alternative to the present City Council is the 3/15/45 City Council, that is, 3 councilpersons per district with the same 15 districts, totaling 45 councilpersons, for a total of 45 votes. That size is in line with New York and Chicago.
Most Vital Element of the 3/15/45 City Council
The key aspect of the 3/15/45 City Council is that all three councilmembers from a district absolutely, positively must run against each other in the same election. While the election of different council districts may be staggered, it is imperative that within a district, all three councilpersons are elected at the same time. They must run against each other.
The greatest thing about the 3/15/45 City Council is that it automatically kills corruptionism. Yes, once instituted, it will be impossible for Garcetti to force councilmembers to give billions of taxpayers’ dollars to his developer buddies. Unanimous voting will be dead!
How the 3/15/45 Council Operates
(1) Each one of the city’s 15 City Council districts will have three City Councilpersons which means we will have a total 45 City Councilpersons, each with one vote -- a total of 45 votes.
(2) The three Councilpersons per district will all be elected at the same time which means the three top vote-getters will each become a Councilperson.
(3) Because all three councilpersons in a district must run against each other in the same election, corrupt developers cannot control any district election. This will kill the unanimous voting at City Council. The new structure will result in candidates running for the three seats in each district by appealing to competing constituencies. In democracy, there is no valid reason to have a winner-take-all government in which the vast majority of the population ends up with no say.
How the 3/15/45 City Council Will Kill Corruptionism
Presently, LA City Councilmembers are required to vote “Yes” for every corrupt development project, no matter how many hundreds of millions in extortion and bribery dollars are attached to it. That is why everything presently passes unanimously. Any councilmember who does not partake in this illegal scam will never have anything he wants approved. If he doesn’t goes along with the corruption, his district is screwed.
The 3/15/45 City Council Ends Retaliation against Members who Refuse to Participate in Corruptionism
Since all three councilpersons in a district run against each other, they will necessarily appeal to different voting constituencies. Developers will spend a fortune to elect their own puppet, but so what if one of the three councilpersons is a thief? There will be two others, each with his or her own vote. If the “park people” in CD 4, for instance, had been able to elect one of the three Councilpersons, that member would not have supported a mega project that destroys twenty trees. If another Councilperson favors protecting the poor, he will not support developers who want to demolish rent-controlled units. Money helps politicos only when it buys elections. When the top three candidates in a district race are each elected to be one of three, a developer can spend a $1 billion and still not be able to buy all three seats in that district.
Change the City Charter to Create the 3/15/45 City Council
We can change the City Charter and institute the 3/15/45 City Council. It would not be as difficult as one might think. All it takes is one “class traitor” like FDR to finance the ballot measure.
According to a March 17, 2016 LA Weekly article by Dennis Romero, Los Angeles has 20 billionaires, with Patrick Soon-Shiong being the wealthiest with $12 billion.
While Soon-Shiong is not up to the task, maybe one of the other billionaires could step forward. Okay, we know that Austin Beutner is a flop, and a number of others are obsessed with their pubescent desires to own a sports team. Even if we have to drop down the financial hierarchy to the civic-minded people worth only a few hundred million dollars, maybe one of them might be up to the challenge to form a group to rid LA of corruptionism by instituting the 3/15/45 City Council.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a Los Angeles attorney and a CityWatch contributor. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Abrams views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of CityWatch.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
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